Cave in the snow. A western woman’s quest for enlightenment Read online

  Her father, George Perry, was a fishmonger, owning the shop downstairs. George was a small man, twenty years older than his wife, and liked to enjoy himself. He frequented the ‘horses’,the ’dogs’, the music-halls, and as a Pearly King would dress up in his suit of pearly buttons whenever occasion demanded. He’d been gassed in World War 1, and suffered badly from bronchitis as a result. Working in a cold, wet fish shop didn’t help. He died at the age of fifty-seven, when Tenzin Palmo was just two.

  ’Sadly, I never knew him, but I heard he was a very kind man.I remember being told how my mother, being so much younger, used to like to go out dancing with her dancing partners and he encouraged her, having a meal ready on the table when she came home. I know he very much wanted me after having two sons from a previous marriage. But for me he was out of the picture,’ she said.

  It was left to her mother, Lee Perry, a former housemaid, to bring up Tenzin Palmo and her brother Mervyn, six years older. Lee was by all accounts a remarkable woman. She was feisty, open-minded, optimistic in the face of adversity and, most significantly for this story, a spiritual seeker and a staunch supporter of Tenzin Palmo in all her endeavours throughout all her life. They were very close.

  ‘My mother was wonderful. I admired her enormously,’ she said ’She worked extremely hard and was always interested in new ideas. She was also a free spirit. When she met my father he was separated but not divorced from his first wife but she moved in with him and had two children by him anyway, which was quite unusual in those days. By the time his divorce came through she still didn’t marry him because she had got used to her independence.’

  The environment that Tenzin Palmo was brought up in could not have been more quintessentially English. All around her were the Cockneys, the ’real Londoners’, renowned for their sharp wit, quick tongues, and latterly for winning Brain of Britain competitions. The East End then was a friendly place to live in. Tenzin Palmo knew everyone in the neighbourhood, her Uncle Harry owned the pub over the road, the street life was lively and the bomb sites provided the children with excellent adventure playgrounds.

  In spite of all this, however, the seeds of the unusual life she was to follow were there from the start, proving in her case that nature won over nurture.

  She was an introspective and reclusive child, having friends but never wanting to bring them home. ‘I wasn’t interested. I knew there was something else I had to do with my life,’ she said. ‘I just really liked being by myself. I was very happy just to sit and read. I remember again and again my teachers lending me books, which they didn’t do with other children. ‘ She was also curiously drawn to the East, although there was no thriving Asian community in the East End as there is today and nobody in her family was remotely interested in the Orient. ‘I would spend hours alone drawing Japanese ladies in flowing kimonos. I can still see all the intricate patterns I painted on them. When the first Chinese restaurants opened in the West End I would beg my mother to take me there so that I could see some oriental faces.’ There was also her inexplicable fascination with nuns, especially the contemplative orders. ‘I liked the idea of the enclosed nuns, the sort that go in and never come out and spend all their life in prayer. The idea of that kind of lifestyle was enormously appealing. Once I went into a neighbourhood shop and the shopkeeper asked me what I was going to be when I grew up. I replied quite spontaneously, “A nun”. She laughed and said I’d change my mind when I grew older and I thought, “You’re wrong!" The problem was I didn’t know what kind of a nun I was going to be.’

  There were other anomalies. Just as she felt perpetually displaced in England, she also felt strangely ‘wrong’ as a girl. ’I was very confused by being a female,’ she explained. ‘It just didn’t feel right. I kept hearing adults say that when you reached adolescence your body changed and I would think, “Oh good, then I can go back to being a boy."’ This enigma, like many others, would be explained later.

  If her temperament was ideally equipped for a future life of solitary meditation in a cave, her body could not have been less well suited. Her entire childhood was dominated by a series of illnesses which left her so enfeebled that her doctors and teachers advised, when she left school, that she should never take up any career that was remotely taxing. She was born with the base of her spine twisted inwards and tilted to the left, making the whole of her spinal column off-balance. To compensate she developed round shoulders, the hunched look which she carries to this day. It was an excruciatingly painful condition which left her with weak vertebrae and prone to lumbago. As a child she went three times a week to hospital for physiotherapy but it didn’t help (although later yoga did).When she was a few months old she got meningitis, recovered and then got it again. She was rushed to hospital, where her parents could only view her from behind glass. Staring at the undersized baby lying there with her stick-like limbs and huge blue eyes, a distraught Lee declared, ‘She’s going to die.’ ‘Oh, no, she’s not. Look at those eyes! She’s longing to live,’ replied George.

  Then there was the mystery illness which baffled doctors and left her hospitalized for months at a time. She lost much schooling, at one time spending eight months at the famous Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, and was so generally weak that her school arranged for her to have regular compulsory convalescent periods at the seaside, at the council’s expense.

  ‘No one knew what it was, but two or three times a year I would be completely debilitated with high fevers, and terrible headaches. I was very sick. Personally, I think it was a karmic thing because when I got older it just disappeared, and I was never seriously ill in the cave,’ she said. ‘Because of these very high fevers I used to have a lot of out-of-body experiences,’ she continued. ’I used to travel around the neighbourhood but because I was a little girl I wouldn’t go far from home. I didn’t want to get lost. So I would just wander around the streets, floating above everything, looking down on people for a change, instead of always looking up at them. I tried it again when I was a teenager but I got scared so I never developed the ability.’

  There were accidents too, which also brought fascinating consequences, such as the time when she playing with a ball inside the house and her nylon dress brushed against the electric fire. Within seconds she was a mass of flames. Fortunately Lee happened to be at home and not in the fish shop, as she herself was sick. The young Tenzin Palmo rushed into her mother’s room with her dress ablaze, screaming. Lee leapt out of bed, wrapped her in blankets and dashed her to hospital.

  ’The amazing thing was I had no pain, even though my back was one big red, raw mess. I remember being wheeled down the hospital corridor with the doctor holding my hand and telling me what a brave girl I was for not crying. But it wasn’t hurting at all. I stayed in hospital for ages with this frame holding the sheets off my body but I was left with no scars. Later, when I was older, my mother told me that when she had seen me engulfed in flames she had prayed fervently that my pain be taken from me and given to her instead. I was interested because by then I had heard about the Buddhist practice called Tong Lin where you breathe in the suffering of others to relieve them of their misery, and give out in its place all your health and well-being in the form of white light. My mother had done this profound practice absolutely spontaneously! Furthermore, it worked. She said that although her prayer was absolutely sincere she never received the extra pain of my burns. She was amazing. She did that, even though she was in agony herself,’ she said. ‘Actually I think I came into this family because of her,’ she added quietly, referring to her inherent belief in reincarnation, and by implication that she had chosen this Western life in a female body for some specific purpose.

  When she was not ill, life in the East End went on as normal. It was a decidedly no-frills existence. Tenzin Palmo shared a bedroom with her brother Mervyn, the bath was brought out once a week, and money was in desperately short supply. She explained: ’After my father died my mother took over the fish shop, only unbeknown to h
er an uncle who was managing the shop was gambling on the horses. The family ended up being enormously in debt and my mother had to work doubly hard to make ends meet.’

  Financially strained and fatherless they might have been, but it was, nevertheless, a happy, normal childhood, something that would hold her in good stead later when she faced her years of solitude. There were penny bus rides to the parks and museum, and the occasional treat of a Walt Disney film. Added to this was the forbidden delight of the fish shop’s smoke holes (the last remaining ones in London), two large brick chimneys in the back yard blackened with tar, and lined with shelves for smoking the haddocks and bloaters. They were dangerous but fun. ’To be honest we never thought much about being poor, it was simply how we lived. We always had enough to eat and one’s goals in those times were so much more modest,’ she remarked. ‘We didn’t miss having a father at all! In fact, we got on very well without one. I noticed that we didn’t have any conflict or tension in our house, whereas there often was in my friends’ houses.’

  Tenzin Palmo grew up to be a pretty child, still thin, but with those same huge blue eyes. Her bald head had given way to a mop of light brown curls. She was so engaging to look at, in fact, that later her monastery in India insisted on pinning up a picture of her at this age. ‘I reached my peak at three – after that it was downhill,’ she laughs. She fought with her brother, whom she idolized, following him in umpteen pranks which he thought up. ‘I used to be dressed up as the guy for Guy Fawkes night, sitting motionless on the pavement for hours! And once he got me to approach strangers on Hampstead Heath asking them for money for the bus ride home, telling them our mother had abandoned us. He’s always said ever since that it was him who put me on the path of the begging bowl!’

  She liked her two schools, Teesdale Street Primary School and the John Howard Grammar School, whose motto from Virgil was singularly apt: ’They Can Because They Think They Can’. She was a good pupil, though not outstanding, doing well in English, history and IQ tests, which she always topped. ’This doesn’t mean I was necessarily intelligent, merely that I have the sort of mind that can do intelligence tests,’ she said modestly. She also invariably took the annual progress prize, an accolade which she also dismisses. ‘Basically it meant you had done your best, which in my case wasn’t true. I didn’t try hard at school at all because fundamentally I didn’t find the subjects very interesting.’

  As might be expected in this tale, however, it was in the spiritual arena where the most interesting developments were taking place. Lee was a spiritualist and every Wednesday at 8 p.m. the neighbours would arrive at 72 Old Bethnal Green Road for their weekly seance.

  ‘We used to sit round this huge mahogany table with legs the size of tree trunks which had come from some grand house and one of the neighbours who was a medium would go into trance and get messages from the spirit guides. I remember one night my mother made some joke about the spirits not being very strong and they took up the challenge. They asked the greengrocer, a woman of about 18 stone, to sit on top of the table then they lifted the whole thing up, this huge heavy piece of furniture, and it sailed around the room with the greengrocer perched on top. We all had to run into the corners to get out of the way,’ Tenzin Palmo recalled.

  She never doubted the authenticity of what was going on. It was her house, she knew there were no trapdoors and no one was being paid. ‘I gained a lot from those experiences,’ she continued. ‘There is no way now anyone could tell me that consciousness does not exist after death because I have so much proof again and again that it does. It’s not a belief, it’s a knowledge, a certainty. I also learnt that there are many dimensions of being that are absolutely real, which we are not normally conscious of. And because of the seances we talked about death a lot in our family, in a very positive way. We discussed what it was all about and what happened next. It was one of our major topics of interest. And I’m enormously grateful for that. Many people avoid thinking about death and are mainly afraid of it, and if you’re not it removes an enormously heavy burden from your life.

  ‘For me, death is the next stage on, another opening up. We’ve done so many things in the past and now we are to go on to an infinite future. This gives much less anxiety about this life because it is seen as a little waterdrop in a big pool. And so for this lifetime you do what you need to do for this lifetime and it doesn’t matter about all the rest because you’ve probably already done it before or else you’ll do it in the future. It gives one a sense of spaciousness, and hope.’

  From an early age, however, Tenzin Palmo was showing signs of a penetrating mind and a highly questioning nature qualities that she was to carry with her all her life. She was never going to be an easy believer. ‘I didn’t like the way spiritualism hooked people in so they didn’t let go and get on with their lives. Those seances became the very centre of our neighbours’ existence, increasing their attachment. I also thought that on the whole people asked such stupid questions,’ she said. ‘They didn’t get down to the profound issues that I thought really mattered. They were mostly interested in chit-chat with their dead relatives. Personally I thought it was a waste of the spirit guide’s time and knowledge.’

  The ‘issues’ that were preoccupying the young Tenzin Palmo were both precocious and profound. They were also curiously Buddhist: ’I couldn’t have put it in these words but what concerned me was how we get beyond the dilemma of constantly coming back and having to experience again and again the inherent suffering in our existence.’

  There was one particular incident from her childhood which illustrated perfectly the way her mind was working: ‘I was about thirteen and was coming home with my mother after visiting an aunt and uncle,’ she recalled. ‘We’d had a very pleasant evening and were waiting for the bus. Sitting at the bus stop I had this sudden flash – that we were all going to die, and before that we were all going to get old and probably sick too. We hadn’t been talking about these things, it just came to me. I remember watching the buses going past all lit up with the people inside laughing and talking and thinking, “Don’t they know, don’t they see what is going to happen?" I said to my mother that life was really very sad because of what we had to go through. And my mother who had had a terrible life really, struggling to bring up two children, with incredibly awful health and so many financial problems replied: “Yes, of course there’s a lot of suffering in life but there are good things too." I thought, she’s missed the point! There are good things BUT underlying it all is the fact of ageing, sickness and death, and that negates all the other things.

  ‘But people couldn’t see it, they were so indifferent. I could never understand why. Didn’t they understand this is a terrible situation we’re all trapped in? I felt it really, really in the depths of my being,’ she said with great feeling. ‘However, since nobody understood what I was talking about, and just thought I was being incredibly gloomy, I stopped discussing it.’

  Interestingly, what the young girl was worrying about in the East End of London was exactly the same issue that had troubled the young Prince Siddhartha in India back in 560 BC when he had left his sheltered palace and been confronted with a diseased man, an ageing man and a corpse. These ungainly sights had had such a shocking impact on his sensibilities that he had abandoned his easy, privileged existence and gone searching for the reasons that lay behind the human condition with all its attendant suffering. After many years of wandering, testing and trying the various spiritual methods on offer, he finally found his answer under the boddhi tree in Bodhgaya where, in profound meditation, he broke through the barriers of ignorance and attained Enlightenment. In doing so he became the Buddha, the Fully Awakened One, and triggered off a religion which was to inspire millions down the ages who tried to emulate him. But they were mostly in the East.

  There was, however, another larger question which was preoccupying Tenzin Palmo, one which was to form the raison d’etre of the entire course of this present life. It was the very touchsto
ne of Buddhism. ‘I wanted to know, how do we become perfect? Ever since I was small I had this conviction that we were in fact innately perfect and that we had to keep coming back again and again to rediscover our true nature. I felt that somehow our perfection had become obscured and that we had to uncover it, to find out who we really were. And that was what we were here for. I asked my mother if she believed in reincarnation and she replied that it seemed very logical to her and she didn’t see why not, so that part of the question seemed OK.’

  Getting the answer to the rest of it was more of a problem. She asked the spirit guides.

  ‘First of all, I asked, “Is there a God?" And they said, “We definitely don’t think there is a God in the sense of a person, but ultimately we feel there is light, and love and intelligence." That sounded good to me. So then I asked them the number one question in my life, “How do we become perfect?" And they replied, “You have to be very good and very kind." And I thought, "They don’t know." At that point I completely lost interest in spiritualism as a path,’ she said.

  She next turned to the local priest, Father Hetherington, whom she liked on account of the fact that he was tall, ascetic and monk-like. She would go to her local Anglican church occasionally with Lee, appreciating its pseudo-Gothic architecture.

  ‘He replied, “Well, you have to become good." And, “You have to become good and you have to be kind." And I thought, “That’s not it!" Of course you’ve got to be good and kind, that’s the foundation. But Perfection! That’s something else. I knew a lot of people who were good and kind, but they certainly weren’t perfect. It was something more. What was the more, that was what I wanted to know,’ she said, her voice taking on the urgency she had felt when she was a child.